The New York Times highlighted a new study showing states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) saw noticeable improvements in public health outcomes relative to states that did not enact the expansion -- adding to mounting evidence debunking right-wing media paranoia about the inevitable demise of Obamacare.

On August 9, the Times reported that a new article in JAMA Internal Medicine -- a subsidiary of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) -- points to the ACA as a component in improving American public health through Medicaid expansion and increasing access to health care. The newspaper noted that this report comes after multiple studies have shown the ACA has been reducing Americans’ medical debt and encouraging more Americans to see a doctor for regular preventative services -- showing that the law is effective at accomplishing its goal of assisting Americans’ access to quality health care. From The New York Times:

A few recent studies suggest that people have become less likely to have medical debt or to postpone care because of cost. They are also more likely to have a regular doctor and to be getting preventive health services like vaccines and cancer screenings. A new study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, offers another way of looking at the issue. Low-income people in Arkansas and Kentucky, which expanded Medicaid insurance to everyone below a certain income threshold, appear to be healthier than their peers in Texas, which did not expand.

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Their survey found people in Arkansas and Kentucky were nearly 5 percent more likely than their peers in Texas to say they were in excellent health in 2015. And that difference was bigger than it had been the year before.

No two states are exactly the same, of course. There are many differences between Texas, Arkansas and Kentucky, besides their decisions on this part of the Affordable Care Act. The authors cautioned that their results can’t prove that Medicaid expansion caused people to be healthier.

These findings come one month after JAMA published an article President Obama wrote about the accomplishments of his signature legislation since it became law in 2010. The president’s article, the first scholarly work ever authored by a sitting president, noted that the uninsured rate has dropped 43 percent (from 16.0 percent in 2010 to 9.1 percent in 2015), that the law has contributed to greater financial security for Americans, and that it has actually led to better public health.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board assailed President Barack Obama's call for a “Medicare-like” public health insurance option as "radicalism" that would "wipe out anything resembling private insurance," when in reality a public option would likely increase competition, lower costs, and expand access to health care for American consumers.

In an article published by The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on July 11, President Obama wrote about the accomplishments of his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or “Obamacare,” since it became law in 2010. The article, the first scholarly work ever authored by a sitting president, noted that the uninsured rate has dropped 43 percent (from 16.0 percent in 2010 to 9.1 percent in 2015), that the law has contributed to greater financial security for Americans and that it has actually led to better public health. But the president also noted that there is still work to be done on health care reform, including the need for a “Medicare-like public plan” that could compete with private insurance. On July 9, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton publicly reaffirmed her support for the “public option,” a policy she has championed since 1993.

With the Democratic Party coalescing around the public option as the next step for health care reform, the Journal’s editorial board claimed the introduction of a publicly run insurer into the individual health insurance exchanges would lead to a “market exodus” by private insurers and eventually to a “government-run single payer” universal health care system. Hypocritically, the Journal claimed both that the public option would inevitably destroy private insurance and that the failure of several nonprofit health care co-operatives set up by the existing law stood as proof that government-run insurance systems could not work. From the July 12 editorial (emphasis added):

Mr. Obama is re-endorsing what he had hoped in 2010 would be a way station for government-run single payer that would gradually wipe out anything resembling private insurance. Insurers can’t outbid a “free” program that is open to all or most and has the unlimited access to the Treasury that Medicare enjoys. A market exodus would be inevitable.

Democrats claim this would merely be another choice, but they tried a trial-run public option with ObamaCare’s co-ops, which were given up-front federal cash infusions and then were supposed to operate like normal companies. Of the original 24 co-ops, only nine are alive—and most of the survivors are ailing.

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Even after jettisoning the public option, ObamaCare passed the Senate with a bare 60-vote majority and the House 219-212, though Democrats commanded their largest majorities since the Great Society. Republicans couldn’t stop anything, but they did oppose the public option for the same reasons as the business community and moderate Democrats: Over time, its radicalism would annex all of U.S. health-care finance.

The Journal’s fearmongering that competition from public option “radicalism” would usurp the private insurance market lacks evidence: Research suggests a public insurance plan would lead to lower premiums and reap enormous benefits for American taxpayers.

According to Kaiser Health News, increasing competition in individual health care marketplaces has shown to lower prices for consumers, and less competition in a state can lead to “substantially higher premiums.” In an op-ed published by The Hill, Richard Kirsch of the Roosevelt Institute noted that a public option can keep costs down without limiting provider options, since the government already pays for care at most of the country’s doctors offices and hospitals for Medicare beneficiaries. Unlike private insurers with limited provider networks, a government-run plan would already have the infrastructure to provide low-cost competition nationwide.

In addition to increasing competition and driving down costs, a public option could dramatically decrease government spending on health care, research suggests. According to an October 2009 policy brief by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley's Center on Health, Economic & Family Security, a public option would be so beneficial for the American health insurance market that it would “most likely both expand coverage and reduce costs to employers, individuals, and the government.” The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) came to the same conclusion in a March 2012 working paper, which included “a public insurance option” among progressive reforms that together could save the government an additional $278 billion over 10 years. Likewise, a November 2013 analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted that adding a public option to existing Obamacare insurance marketplaces could actually reduce federal spending by $158 billion over 10 years.

The Journal claims the introduction of a public option would lead to universal single-payer health care, but it fails to provide either any proof that the public option would do that or an explanation of why that would be detrimental. The Journal does use the problems faced by government-assisted nonprofit insurers -- called co-ops -- as proof that a public option would not work, but it doesn’t mention that Republicans in Congresscut co-op funding. Meanwhile, though the president has not advocated a national single-payer health plan, economist Gerald Friedman estimated that such a system could save the American economy as much as $592 billion a year, most of which would come from “slashing the administrative waste associated with the private insurance industry.”

Several conservative media figures lashed out at President Barack Obama after an attack on police officers in Dallas, TX, during a peaceful demonstration against the recent police shootings of two black men. Numerous Fox personalities blamed Obama for the attacks and right-wing media figures criticized his remarks in the aftermath of the shootings.

After nearly four years of right-wing myths about the September 2012 attack on an American diplomatic compound and CIA compound in Benghazi, Libya, and as Republicans and Democrats on the House Select Committee on the attacks release their reports, Media Matters has compiled a list of more than 50 myths and facts regarding the origin of the attack, the security surrounding the compounds, the Obama administration’s handling of the attack during and after its occurrence, attacks on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other lies and misinformation regarding the Benghazi attack.

According to the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, the Obama administration cannot exercise prosecutorial discretion in deferring deportation for certain undocumented immigrants because such discretion cannot be applied to "entire classes of people." For years, the board has misrepresented the way Obama's executive actions on immigration defer deportation for some undocumented immigrants, despite legal experts and evidence showing that the administration can apply prosecutorial discretion as it reviews deferred action cases on a "case-by-case basis."

On Equal Pay Day, Fox News devoted less than one minute of airtime to cover President Obama’s speech at the newly-designated Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington D.C., while MSNBC and CNN aired the speech nearly in its entirety.

Obama spoke at the designation of the monument seeking to “honor the movement for women’s equality,” which coincided with the 20th anniversary of Equal Pay Day -- the day when the average woman's pay catches up with the average man's from the previous year. According to an April 2016 report from the American Association of University Women (AAUW), working women in the United States earned “just 79 percent of what men were paid” in 2014, with disparities far worse for women of color. President Obama’s speech was covered for over 10 minutes on MSNBC and CNN, nearly the entire duration of the speech. In contrast, Fox briefly noted that the speech was occurring, but never cut away to hear Obama’s remarks, which lasted almost 12 minutes. The guest host of Fox News’ Happening Now, Heather Childers, described the monument and Equal Pay Day but instead of cutting to the speech, simply noted, “We wanted to let you know it was going on”:

HEATHER CHILDERS: We do have a Fox News alert for you, we are going to take you live to Washington D.C., that’s where President Obama is delivering remarks at the newly designated Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument there in D.C. Of course, it is dedicated to women's equality. It's a house and a museum. It includes a collection of different artifacts, suffrage banners, archives, all related to voting rights for women and equality for women. And this is coming as a matter of fact on Equal Pay Day, a day meant to symbolize how much more a woman has to work on average to earn what a man earned in the previous year, so that's going on in Washington, D.C. for you, right now. We wanted to let you know it was going on.

This poor coverage of the gender pay gap is not new to the network that has continually dismissed the issue as “an absolute myth,” blamed womens' choices for their lack of pay equity, and targeted celebrities and athletes who spoke out about wage disparities in their industries.

Right-wing media outlets are parroting the attacks of an anti-LGBTQ hate group on Connecticut’s openly gay comptroller, Kevin Lembo. Lembo recently sent the American Family Association (AFA) a letter asking the group to submit written documentation certifying it complies with the nondiscrimination regulations governing the Connecticut State Employee Campaign for Charitable Giving (CSEC), which allows Connecticut State employees to contribute to qualifying non-profit charities through payroll deductions. Lembo’s office has since been “flooded” with emails and phone calls from AFA supporters.